


The Morning After

by arienai



Series: Bosselot Week 2016 [4]
Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Creative use of chemical weapons, M/M, This is romantic somehow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 20:11:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,841
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8547517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arienai/pseuds/arienai
Summary: In the dying days of the Diamond Dogs, John picks up Adam and takes him home.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt #5 - Reunion
> 
> (There is a subtle, blink-and-you'll-miss-it allusion to sexual assault in here. I don't think it warrants a tag, but consider yourself warned.)

There's a story Adam likes to tell about how the two of you met again, after all those years:

He's standing at the seaside facing eastward outside the port of Mombasa. The sun is just about rise - tiny silver slivers of light pierce the low-hanging clouds at the edge of the horizon, above the grey waves. He stands there at the edge of a cliff, eyes on the dawn. Hair and scarf and coat whipping in the early morning breeze.

He carries a single satchel: all he saw fit to take with him from the Diamond Dogs. The rest he'll leave behind. The Diamond Dogs were to be disbanded, so that you could rise as an American hero once more. Your phantom has begun his final preparations to leave and his presence is no longer required. From this vantage he watches a new day begin over the Seychelles.

He doesn't turn when he hears the roar of your motorcycle in the distance, nor does he when it stills to a rumble as you draw close. Not when your boots crunch the dusty, rocky roadside; not even when your arms encircle him from behind and he breathes in the scents of sweat and leather. 

"Thanks Adam," you say, needlessly.

"Anytime," he says, though he needn't have, either.

"...Don't want to go see it?" Wouldn't have been so much of a drive, from there.

"Never had much interest in heaven." Something in which he, like any good communist, doesn't believe: "I'd rather be where you are."

"Let me take you home, then," you offer instead.

"Sure," he shrugs as if he'd ever be indifferent to that idea, though his smile gives him away.

You pause thoughtfully, then press cool steel into his palm. "...You want to drive?"

He laughs. "Thought you'd never ask."

And the two of you fade into the west, into the predawn darkness, together as the sunlight spills across the rest of the world.

It's a nice story, and hell, maybe something like that even happened once. Adam rarely invents these things whole cloth. It's one of Eva's favourites: she's always been a fan of the idea of the two of you. A fifty-year romance. Unbroken loyalty across the decades. She might have betrayed you, twice, but Adam never has. He toys with it, sometimes. Drops hints for those who don't like him - like Miller - that he made it up; stokes the flames of that man's powerful contempt even higher. Sometimes he drives, sometimes you do.

It's just a story, after all, and stories change with the telling.

What really happened? Why, something even more romantic, of course. He showed up at your doorstep with a priceless gift and you carried him across the threshold of your new home.

The Diamond Dogs threw him out. It wasn't difficult to orchestrate: he finally told Miller something the man should have figured out a long time ago -

-No, not that. He figured _that_ out a lot sooner than you gave him credit for.

\- and Miller obliged him with the most spectacular eruption of outrage you ever saw. The intelligence division just about went to war with the rest of Mother Base and it was all your phantom could do to keep them from killing one another. Adam offered to leave and Miller spat that, if he ever saw him again, one of them wouldn't survive the encounter.

Fair enough.

It had to be convincing, you see. Or else the Patriots would have asked him to try to reinfiltrate that operation; now they knew that in no uncertain terms could he ever do that. Your phantom could operate in peace, out of sight, while you orchestrated the switch. 

Instead, he returned to Afghanistan. These were the dog days of the war. 'Cipher' now meant 'Anderson', not Zero, and that meant the fight turned to machines, rather than information. Smaller than the eye could see, larger than a skyscraper; surface-to-air missiles that a single person could carry and that never missed their targets. The Stingers they planted in the hands of the Mujahideen finally trumped the theretofore invincible Hinds and before long a bankrupt USSR began to withdraw, licking its wounds. 

A dangerous place to be, that. The dying days of a lost war, about to be overrun. Particularly for someone as well-known as Shalashaska. He made the rounds of his old haunts, tying up loose ends and collecting some lingering scraps of intelligence. When he saw the mist on the horizon he left a single handwritten note behind, buried: Two Weeks.

He's not really sure how many of them he killed before they beat him into unconsciousness. He could flatter himself with dozens, though it might not have been any. Hamstrung with orders to ensure that he survived he's fairly sure he could have lasted all damn day. But, wouldn't you know it, the dust kept jamming up the extractors of his Tornadoes and obstructions are much harder to clear in revolvers than pistols. It had to be convincing, so he stabbed a few after that, too. You never can tell with knife wounds, though. If those things could take a magnum round to the face and keep moving they probably shrugged off a knife to the neck.

He was still a bloody, bruised, shuddering wreck when he woke up. They'd bound him up tight enough to stress his joints, and that'd get old very quickly. He distracted himself by counting down the hours until he'd get to see you again. It'd been years. He should pick something up for you along the way. 

"You're never going to break him with this schoolyard bullshit," he heard one of them say when they let him up for air before shoving his face back down into a bucket of water again, fist in his hair, "You need to work on his mind."

Hah. Good one. That had to be the Patriot plant. His physical resistance was _highly_ respectable, but his mind? His mind was his _masterpiece_.

They sleep deprived him. That doesn't sound so bad to the uninitiated, but it feels awful and you can die from it. Well, a lot of things feel awful and you can die from them, but the special thing about sleep deprivation is the havoc it wreaks on you mind. It only took about three days before the hallucinations started. He heard the rain, underground. So clearly that he expected it to fall on his upturned face. Every time he'd start to nod off they'd blare loud music; when that no longer worked, they kicked him savagely.

His heart rate revved and stuttered uncontrollably; his whole body shook. By the end of the week he could no longer recall what day it was, where he was, or what he was doing there. That was when they decided they could move him safely.

That was when he started seeing you. 

You were right there with him the whole time. You looked amused by his antics, as usual. You're the only man in the world who really knows him, but there's so much you don't yet know. "You were right about the revolvers," he explained. "But Makarovs stick when you rack the slide too slowly."

"What the fuck?" someone said.

But you understood. Another secret shared between the two of you; another grin, like when he'd jabbed your missing eye or you'd shot him with a blank cartridge. You were you back in Tselinoyark: greasy, bloody, bathed in stale sweat and stinking of dead animals. He wouldn't trade it for the world.

"God, you're disgusting," he laughed. You slapped him across face, but you had to be joking: the two of you never fight that way. You play CQC. You don't want to break any of his bones and he doesn't want to stab you, so it's all pretend. He likes pretend. He _especially_ likes the way you strip down to wrestle; he wins even if he loses.

Someone threw food at him. It was you, wasn't it? At one of Zero's fancy parties. He knew it was you. Behave yourself, John. There's nothing funny about getting soft artisanal cheeses all over Adam's bespoke tuxedo; there's nothing funny about Adam ducking the next one so that it ends up in Eva's cleavage. He's definitely not covering his mouth and retaliating with caviar. Bet you never thought she could throw a right hook like that, did you?

Someone put him in a helicopter. He should have been watching the position of the sun and memorizing the terrain so that he could point it out on a map later, like they'd taught him to, but he was too delighted by you. Too distracted by the way the few silver hairs he sees in your beard suit you. You, the commander of the MSF. The soldiers without borders that Zero plans to police the world without borders. The soldiers you plan to ram down his throat until he chokes on them. "Welcome aboard the Mil Mi-24, John. Enjoy your flight."

_"I thought these things were still in development."_

"I open my presents early." The face you made when the Hind reduced an outpost along the Iranian border to flaming rubble with a flurry of S-5 missiles was the mirror of the one he's seen when he fucks you right to a shuddering orgasm. "And the GRU get all the best toys."

_"Can't imagine what it looks like on the other end._

Your hunger. Your thrill. Your need for that challenge; a new enemy to conquer. 

So he decided to show you.

"Run, John." _A wicked little grin as the gunship's autocannons spool up; blinding lights; deafening whine._

God, that was so good. It was so good. He told you so. You were wearing your FOXHOUND uniform when he landed. You were ready to play and so was he; you dragged him down, down somewhere by the throat and his torn up feet dragged limply across the floor behind him but he still fought back a little bit. Just enough to make it good. You like it rough and he indulges you. You were _brutal_ , that time, but he still came. Still kissed you.

"Who the hell is John? Did we break him? He's lost his fucking mind."

He knew two weeks was up when they forgot to kick him awake. They had other things on their plate: the walls and the ceiling shook, dust sprinkled free by the relentless bombardment above. This was going to cost a lot of money; good thing Kaz wasn't there to needle you about it. He closed his eyes to the soothing vibration and slept... he can't even pretend he knows how long, but he slept. Slept long enough that you'd disappeared, before a bucket of water was dumped over his head.

He coughed weakly and rubbed his eyes with trembling hands. Yes, that was the one. The Patriot plant. The one who convinced them not to do anything permanent. The battle still raged above. Between you and the last, desperate, defiant holdouts against Anderson's succession and the drawing in of Cipher's disparate arms into the Patriots, born anew. The last resistance XOF had mounted. Anderson had been trying to hunt them down for years. 

"You're _good_." Their spy shook his head, incredulous. Offered Adam a hand up. "They told me you were good, but _god damn_. Do you know how long I've been trying to infiltrate this place?"

"Since March 1979," Adam stated plainly and limped along after him toward whatever exit plan he had.

"And not only do you get us inside, you deliver Big Boss on a platter. On schedule. Two weeks, like _clockwork_." _Oh boy, another talker,_ Adam thought, coherent enough to make lucid observations once more. They were underground. There were struts. Nobody around; they probably had bigger problems on their hands. 

"Mine tunnels?" Adam asked.

"That's where they hid from us. On the maps this place is a write off: an explosion decades ago that killed most of the workers. But some of it was still usable. Off radar, out of satellite observation. Leads to an open pit they can launch their vehicles from," he explained and Adam nodded along. He knew how they'd done it before the man walked him through the abandoned passageways to where the Patriot forces waited, ready to spring their trap.

An assortment of Anderson's newest creations: fully autonomous walker gears, soldiers that are half-man, half-machine. A miniature metal gear; nothing so elaborate as Sahelanthropus and there are no nukes, but there are missiles aplenty. In addition to conventional troops and vehicles armed to the teeth. All waiting for a victor to emerge above, to swoop in and destroy them. Scavengers. Must've excavated their way in. Not bad.

"Oh yeah," the Patriot added, while Adam gestured for water. "I was told to tell you that we plan to take him alive."

"Kind of you." Adam drank and found a place to sit down. No one was going to ask him to take part in this condition.

So, the plan. 

The plan _was_ for him to use the overrides he's stolen to hijack that gear and turn it on them the second they turned to face you. Risky, to be sure, but pretty fun. You'd be jealous. Miller'd be jealous. He'd probably feel like Death himself up in one of those things, the harbinger of destruction. You'd probably have joked that he needed a giant robot just to keep up with you and your rifle. Provided neither of you took a few missiles to the face. Provided none of them managed to escape through the tunnels and tattled on the two of you to Cipher and blew his cover early.

But, the battlefield is always evolving. You told him that. And if he's being honest, his new plan suits him much better. Punishing hubris is a favourite pastime of his.

Perhaps some other time.

Zero thought men could transcend flesh through consciousness; Anderson thinks men can through metal. But we are all of us just animals, and just as when Zero promised him that you'd rouse yourself through sheer will alone, Adam remains nonplussed. You needed oxygen. They did too. When he found that the cockpit was sealed and had its own air supply, he was ready.

He shot the pilot with his own pistol; they all turned on him, but he was already inside. Its armour would last long enough to fire off a few of those missiles. Right at the chamber wall. The ghosts of the past unleashed to drag them all down to hell.

His father would have been proud.

 

 

The men you'd taken with you on this one were your best. These were the elite; the unbreakably loyal pillars on which your Outer Heaven was founded, the men and women who would follow you anywhere - the rest of those, like Venom, would join them soon. They knew that this was a fight to the death. That the cost would be high. As such, there was naught but stoic professionalism when they saw the first few uninjured corpses. Some had managed to drag themselves a few feet forward before they collapsed; others still clutched their throats with blued fingers.

Your point man dropped to one knee immediately and pulled his mask on before shouting GAS GAS GAS for the others. 

You probably shouldn't have gone any further after that, but you did need to make certain no one made it out. You took the lead, and the corpses turned from those caught in a state of panic, to those who'd simply fallen where they stood; the monitors you brought with you told you that the CO levels were high enough to kill a man in a few breaths. The tunnels were absolutely still. Only the sound of your footsteps and the sucking of air through your oxygen supply. 

Fire burns blue in carbon monoxide, and the charred bodies of the room he stood in were still wreathed in it. The only light there was.

The machines and the weapons and vehicles Anderson so thoughtfully sent were untouched: his gift, to you. 

With sunken black eye sockets and pale hair turned blue-white and a mask over his face he hardly looked human. Hardly looked alive. When he turned around, and _smiled_ \- unmistakably tilting his eyes upward - several of your soldiers took a step back. One of them stumbled over a burned, severed limb; he remembers that part well.

Not you, though. You strode over the corpses and slung your rifle up over your shoulder and pulled him into your arms. You pressed your forehead to his, _smiling_.

He didn't say a word while you carried him out of those tunnels. Neither did you. He stayed awake all the way to the surface, just so he could get the mask off and kiss you.

And a second longer, to light your cigar.

Of _course_ he wants to go see your heaven.

And you would _never_ let him drive.


End file.
